11–20 of 83 posts
Lovely; a monthly sub to an article talking about monthly subs. You have to realise I will never, ever, going to pay ‘thebaffler’ and especially an article explaining that everyone wants subscriptions in a site that gives me one article and the rest is a subscription.
Gross profit is a misleading statistic in the software industry, where almost all of the effort comes from building the thing.
Glad to see them on HN, but a bit disappointed in the response. They article is mostly correct in it’s lampooning.
Even if you disagree with points or find it ironic that they offer a subscription (btw equating producing a publication with SaaS is quite erroneous) — I think its useful to take this as a datapoint on how people outside tech see tech. That matters.
It’s interesting to see my industry described from a different point of view. It misses the key point of the economics of subscriptions: a single up front fee is a disincentive to the constant maintenance that delivers the single biggest piece of value to the customer, that being the continued existence of the software. Instead it creates an incentive to add lines to the marketing BS on this year’s release and priori…
A subscription fee required for receiving updates for an application that you own seems fine. A subscription fee required to avoid that the application you are using will be disabled remotely seems unacceptable. The latter certainly does not create any incentive for the software vendor to improve the quality of their product and to fix its bugs. On the contrary, the latter business model provides a stream of revenue…
Then anyone on Excel 2013 couldn't use any new features because they weren't backwards-compatible 10 years to some public sector organizations that refused to update.
Office 365 is so much better, I can actually send someone a file that uses LAMBDAs or uses PowerQuery and expect them to be able to open it.
Thoma Bravo the “bridge trolls of enterprise software,” they are domestic terrorists if you ask me... because for the majority of people effected by them, its terrorifying. the way they operate is not in our countries/market best interest, but only the interests of a top few, who frankly include real global terrorists as members of the fund. The US should start to investigate PE, PE is crushing the economy under its…
I've been blaming MBAs for ruining large companies for about 15 years. More and more of them were minted, and true to their word, they really have gotten good at extracting every last dollar out of whatever a company sells. Now that small business owners are watching/listening constantly to small business gurus and hustle gurus, those businesses are screwing customers in ways I didnt see 20 years ago. I keep in conta…
I don’t see what MBAs have to do with that, it’s a tale as old as time: given the choice to have the same pay and more leisure time, most people will take more leisure time. The exceptions are probably mostly people doing intellectual labor, not physical labor like pouring driveways.
Lovely; a monthly sub to an article talking about monthly subs. You have to realise I will never, ever, going to pay ‘thebaffler’ and especially an article explaining that everyone wants subscriptions in a site that gives me one article and the rest is a subscription.
More than "one free article"; I checked and TheBaffler seems to allow you read 4 articles(/mth?) before subscription-walling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than "one free article"; I checked and TheBaffler seems to allow you read 4 articles(/mth?) before subscription-walling.
It literally says it at the bottom for me; from the start; maybe elsewhere it’s another number or it lies. Point stands no? Article writing about subscriptions wants a subscription.
(It literally doesn't say it on the webpage served to me; don't assume the same version is served to all countries)
To me, Obsidian is a perfect example of how to get SaaS-revenue without making the user captive: All data is stored in an accessible form on the user hardware, and what you pay for is sync. X-user kepano (who is a/the creator of Obsidian) has some nice insights on this _file over app_ philosophy.
It becomes a bit more complicated if the data has to be in a specified shape and can only partially be authored by any individual due to authorization requirements. Having a single source of truth on a server is quite a bit easier to reason about and design in this case.
I don't know where Obsidian stands on this, but I assume that if it has collaborative features or complex data constraints it has to do some quite sophisticated stuff to make it work reliably.